


i trust you like a shot in the dark

by CallMeBombshell



Series: this isn't where my heart is but it's something close to home [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 17:05:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/421258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeBombshell/pseuds/CallMeBombshell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Tony’s just finishing the last few tweaks to the armor-removal system on the landing pad (it hadn’t actually sustained any damage, but it was a perfect opportunity to tweak some things) when he hears the elevator ding in the living room.</i> </p><p>  <i>He comes in, wiping his hands ineffectually on a rag, just as the elevator doors slide open and Clint Barton steps out, bag in hand. </i></p><p> </p><p>Clint visits Tony after the aftermath of Loki's invasion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i trust you like a shot in the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bubbly (jeely)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeely/gifts).



> For Jackie, because we both had a bunch of unfinished fics lying around, so we set each other a mutual fic-finishing challenge to boost our productivity :)

It’s been three weeks since Loki’s alien army did it’s best to flatten Manhattan, and Tony’s just about finished rebuilding the tower. He hasn’t bothered with any of the interior decorating outside of his personal spaces; he’s still kind of hoping that he’ll be able to convince the others to come back and stay together as a team. He’s not happy about how it happened, but he thinks they can none of them deny that, in the end, it was a good idea. He’s hoping that they’ll agree, too, to use the tower as their base, rather than the helicarrier, which is why he’s left the decor unfinished, so that the others can create their spaces for themselves.

Tony’s just finishing the last few tweaks to the armor-removal system on the landing pad (it hadn’t actually sustained any damage, but it was a perfect opportunity to tweak some things) when he hears the elevator ding in the living room.

He comes in, wiping his hands ineffectually on a rag, just as the elevator doors slide open and Clint Barton steps out, bag in hand. 

“Place looks a lot better than the last time I was here,” he says, and Tony feels his eyebrows jump; He hadn’t made a noise, and Barton’s back is largely to him and Tony doesn’t think there’s anything reflective that could have let Barton know he was there. It must come with being a super spy-slash-assassin, Tony decides, stepping into the room properly.

“And I’d just gotten this place up and running, too,” he jokes automatically, heading towards the bar. “Drink?”

Barton shakes his head, moving further into the room and dropping his bag on one of the couches. He looks around, taking in the repaired windows and the new flooring before he moves closer to the window and stands there, staring out at the city.

Tony watches him for a moment, taking in the tense line of his shoulders and the way his hands are shoved into his pockets like he’s trying not to ball them into fists. He looks tired, Tony realises, more than he had even after the battle when they were all worn down with fatigue and the last of the adrenaline crash. Something about Barton’s posture speaks to a deeper sort of weariness, the sort that doesn’t seem to go away no matter how much rest one gets. It’s a feeling Tony’s been intimately familiar with for years, not that he’d admit it.

“Didn’t expect to see you out of SHIELD so soon,” Tony says, ignoring the way Barton half-turns towards him for a moment before turning back towards the window.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the visit, ‘cos I totally do, you know, always happy to have people over so I can show off my awesome tower,” Tony continues, taking a few steps over to stand a little ways from Barton, leaning on one shoulder against the windows. “But what are you doing here?”

“You’ve got a spare room or twelve, right?” Barton asks, waving a hand towards the hallway that curves off the living room, leading to the rest of the floor.

“Course I do,” Tony says, rolling his eyes. “Seriously, what kind of awesome host would I be if I didn’t have a guest room ready in case people decide they want to randomly pop in out of nowhere?”

Barton nearly smiles, a tiny upward twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, yeah, sorry, should’ve called, blah blah blah,” he says, rolling his eyes. It doesn’t quite cover up the blank look in his eyes or the way his whole body has gone tense, looking somehow fragile, like he’d shatter if Tony reached out and tapped him too hard. 

He looks like he’s bracing for rejection, for Tony to tell him no, sorry, you can’t stay here, why would you even think that? He looks like he’s only a moment away from turning around, grabbing his bag, and leaving. Tony’s surprised, actually, that he even bothered to bring a bag at all; if it’d been Tony making an impromptu escape from oppressive quarters, he’d have bolted with the clothes on his back and the tech in his pockets and precious little else.

“Shut up, you can come over whenever,” Tony assures Barton, making sure to smile even though there’s something clenching hard and cold in his stomach. “Must be nice to get away from SHIELD for a while, yeah?”

Barton sighs heavily. “You have no idea.”

He can’t imagine how fucked up Barton’s head must be right now, can’t imagine walking down the halls in the helicarrier and having to smile and nod at the people he’d shot at, mind control or no. He can’t imagine the kind of looks Barton must be getting behind his back, the whispers that must be following him, and Barton’s got good ears and better eyes; there isn’t one second of it that he’s going to miss, no matter how much he might want to.

Tony hums against his glass; next to him, Barton raises one hand to rub at his eyes and then through his hair, making it stand on end, hand slipping down to the back of his neck as he tilts his head back, eyes closed. Tony says nothing, just stands looking out at the city, letting Barton have this moment to himself; he looks like he needs it.

“I almost punched Fury in the face,” Barton says, a few minutes later, and Tony whips around to stare at him.

“You _what?_ ”

“He gave me this look, and I swear, I thought he was gonna, like, make my heart stop beating with his mind,” Barton says, carefully avoiding Tony’s wide-eyed, shocked staring. “And then he just looked at me like he’d let me do it anyway.”

“Not that I don’t get it, you know, wanting to punch him, because holy fuck,” Tony says, raising a hand in some sort of oblique gesture of solidarity, “let me tell you how very fucking much I get that. JARVIS, tell him how much I’d like to do that?”

“Would you like that figure in mathematical estimation, or metaphorical?” JARVIS snarks, sounding faintly amused. Tony smirks; he’ll never stop being proud of the emotional matrix he’d managed to give the AI. Barton’s eyes flick upward, a common tick for those not used to dealing with JARVIS, and it makes Tony smile to see it. But, right, they’d been talking, Barton nearly punching Fury and all that.

“But, I mean,” Tony says, biting at his lip, because this is an Emotion Thing, clearly, and Tony’s never been good with Emotion Things, especially when they’re complicated and guilt-ridden and bitter. He’s got enough of that on his own to fill whole volumes of some poor psychologist’s notebooks, and yet he’s never quite managed to figure out how to deal with that in himself, much less in anyone else, much less in Barton, who’s been run ragged and then run through the wringer and then run through hell and high water until he’s finally run himself down to this, tired and worn and still so angry, so guilty and so bitter, and Tony doesn’t even really know him and he hates it, hates what it’s done to the guy.

“Was there a particular reason you wanted to punch Fury in the face?” Tony asks finally, because he’s trying to get his brain back on topic, because the alternative is going to involve Talking and Emotions and Being Supportive And Helpful, and Tony is not good at any of these things.

“He wouldn’t let me into the morgue,” Barton says, quiet, like he’s not sure he should be saying anything. Tony’s heart seems to twist sideways, painful in his chest, and he looks down automatically, half-expecting to see the light of the reactor flickering.

“I just, I don’t know,” Barton says, even softer, more to himself than to Tony. “I guess I just wanted to see, you know? It was my fault. I just wanted to know what I’d done.”

Tony’s silent for a long moment after that, mulling over what to say in his head. He’s been getting better, lately, about not just blurting out the first thing that comes to mind; he thinks Pepper would be proud. He wants to say something, something that might help ease the shadows in Barton’s eyes or relax the tight line of his shoulders, let him unclench his fists in his pockets. Tony wants to say something that will make him smile, even just a little, just enough to make him look less like the weight of the world is bearing down on his shoulders.

“I don’t suppose you’d really believe me if I said it wasn’t your fault,” Tony says finally. “Would you?”

Barton’s mouth twists wryly. “Yeah, not likely, no.”

“Well, I’m gonna say it anyway,” Tony tells him, taking a sip from his glass. “Wasn’t your fault. None of it was.”

“Tell that to the rest of SHIELD,” Barton says, and his wry tone has definitely shifted towards bitter and no, just no, that’s not good, Tony can’t stand that, because, seriously, the guy risked life and limb to help them in the battle, he deserves more than everyone’s suspicious side-eyeing and muttered imprecations and assaults against his character.

Because here’s the thing: Tony’s not a stranger to manipulation and deceit, and he’s not a stranger to doing things you never thought you’d do. 

He still remembers being twenty and an orphan, too old to curl into a ball and cry himself to sleep beneath his sheets the way he wanted to, and too young to fit into the shoes his father left him. 

He remembers the weight of Obie’s hands on his shoulders, at the funeral, in the workshop, on his first day in the office as CEO, remembers the way he’d thought he might not have to do this alone. He remembers asking, a million times, for advice, asking for help, sometimes bluntly, other times slipping the request between the lines of other things, meaningless prattle about work, and he remembers how, every time, Obie answered him without question, without making him feel like he was a burden for asking.

And he remembers, later, looking back and realising that Obie had never just answered him straight, that he’d always been pushing, easing Tony in new directions, turning his attention towards certain projects or certain alternatives, things that Tony, on his own, might never have considered. The Jerichos, Tony remembers, were one of those, one of the projects Obie guided him towards without appearing to do so, just little hints, subtle nudges that Tony, even twenty years later, had still responded to.

He’d had a lot of time, between Obie’s death and his own near brush from palladium poisoning, to take a good hard look at his life, the things he’d done, or not done, the ways in which he could have done them better. After all, if there’s one thing he’s always been good at, he thinks, he’s always been good at screwing up.

And maybe that’s why this thing with Barton angers him so much, because yeah, okay, Barton had fucked up, had gotten people killed, had given up secrets and information to the enemy, had aided the enemy in nearly succeeding to tear the world apart.

After all, he’d had no other choice. 

Loki’s magic had made it impossible for him to even imagine a world without Loki’s orders in his ear, wrapping around his heart and telling him what to do, what to want, feeding him lies about his place in the glorious new world Loki wanted to create.

So yeah, Barton had done terrible things, but no one could say that they were his fault, that he could have done anything else. And when he’d come back, when Romanov had released him from Loki’s control, he hadn’t wasted a minute getting back into the fight, giving everything he had to turn the tables and beat Loki and his army back.

It makes him, Tony thinks, a better man than most, and certainly a better man than Tony.

After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that Tony was still the party boy, the rich man with a girl on each arm, paying for his booze and his cars and his mansion and his plane and his toys with money he got by being the biggest player in the military-industrial money-making machine. The newspapers had called him a war profiteer for years, and he’d never directly denied it, just sidestepped with a practised smile and a clever turn of phrase perfectly clipped to soundbite-length. He’d never denied the effectiveness of the weapons he designed and paid people to build, nor their vast numbers or the fact that, many times, they carefully walked the fuzzy line between effective and overkill.

Tony’s well aware of the ledger Barton keeps in his head, just like Romanov, a mental record of the lives they’ve taken and the things that they’ve done, and Tony has no doubts that both of theirs are heavy with red. 

Tony has never taken another human life with his own two hands, but his own ledger is dripping with enough red to drown Barton’s and Romanov’s a thousand times over, the names of every man, woman, and child killed or hurt by his weapons tallied against him, and no convenient mind-control excuse to wipe them away, no dark magic spell that could be broken, proving that his actions were not his own.

Barton may have killed, may have turned against his own, may have endangered the lives of millions, but there are days when Tony thinks it’s something of a miracle that no one’s thought to lock him away for the things that he’s done.

Because Tony has done terrible things, too, has done more and worse, and he did every single one of them on his own, of his own free will.

Something of his thoughts must be showing on his face, because when he blinks himself back to the present, Barton’s looking at him with concern in his blue eyes, one hand out and hovering at his side like he’s waiting for the right moment to reach out to Tony.

“It’s okay,” Barton says, and Tony can’t tell whether he means he’s okay with the way SHIELD is treating him or if he means that it’s okay, the thoughts he must see reflected on Tony’s face. Either way, Tony supposes, the sentiment applies, so he sets it aside, giving himself a mental shake and trying for a smile. He’s mostly successful, if the tiny uptick of Barton’s mouth is an indication.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, bringing his glass up to his mouth and taking a sip. “There’s a room down the hall, third on the left, that’s free if you want it,” he adds, gesturing vaguely towards the hall.

“You’re sure?” Barton asks, but it doesn’t sound so skittish this time, more like a courtesy and less like Barton’s expecting Tony to change his mind. “I don’t want to be in the way.”

“Yeah, no, it’s cool,” Tony shrugs. “I mean, it’s not like I’ve got some crappy one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and you’re crashing on my couch or something.”

“Right,” Barton says, and he’s smiling, really smiling, “because you know so much about tiny one bedroom apartments in Brooklyn.”

“It’s disgusting, I don’t know why Steve wants to go back there so much,” Tony sniffs, knowing he probably looks affronted, and not caring. It is kind of insulting, he thinks, that he’s got all this space and this shiny new team who all finally came together and kicked a whole lot of alien ass, and then they’d all vanished. 

Well, most of them anyway; Bruce had stayed around for a bit before heading back to Calcutta, but he’d promised Tony that he’d back, as soon as he’d finished up his work there and gotten his things back together. Barton and Romanov had gone back to SHIELD, Thor had beamed back up to Asgard with Loki, and Steve had gone off to see if SHIELD’s promises that his old apartment in Brooklyn was still there were true.

“I’m sure you’ll talk him around in no time,” Barton smirks, leaning off the window and stepping back over toward the couch, grabbing his bag and swinging it over one shoulder.

“I guess I’ll go check out this room you’ve got for me,” he says, walking backward, and Tony grins when he manages to fluidly side-step several pieces of furniture without looking.

“I’m sure it’ll live up to your exacting standards,” Tony says dryly. “After all, what’re you trading up from, bare grey walls and utilitarian metal furniture?”

“Something like that,” Barton admits, pausing at the hallway.

“Well,” Tony says, “just let me know if there’s anything you need, or let JARVIS know, he’s awesome with stuff, it’s sort of his job, hey, JARVIS, make sure Barton’s got everything, yeah?”

“Of course, sirs,” JARVIS says indulgently.

“Thanks,” Barton says, smiling again, and turns down the hall. 

Tony smiles and turns away, back to the window and the view that’s almost free of smoke these days, almost back to being bright and sparkling and shiny like it was before Loki, before the invasion, before all of this.

“Hey, Stark.”

Tony turns back; Barton’s leaning around the corner with a serious expression, although Tony can still see the shadows of his smile at the corners of his eyes. 

“Thanks for this,” Barton says, quiet and honest in a way that probably shouldn’t hit Tony like a punch to the chest, but Tony’s still new to this whole thing where he cares about people, where he genuinely likes him, and it’s still surprising when he gets these gestures right.

“No problem,” Tony says, easy, like this isn’t the first time he’s tried living with someone else since his dorm days at MIT when he was 15 and an idiot.

“It’s gonna be fun,” he says, returning Barton’s smile as he ducks back around the corner. He hears the door open down the hall a moment later as he turns back to the window. He can hear Barton making approving little noises as he scopes out the room and Tony closes his eyes, letting the sounds of someone else fill up the spaces in the room, big and sweeping and empty (but not for long).

Yeah, he thinks. It’s gonna be fun.


End file.
